There’s no need to freak out about how few stock market winners there were in 2015

In 2015, market commentariat types (ahem)
couldn't get enough of
talking about the FANG stocks, or Facebook, Amazon, Netflix,
and Google (which is now Alphabet, but no one wants to be the
person who ruins a good acronym).

The hubbub was all about how these stocks —
along with just a few others — accounted for more than all of
the S&P 500's total return in 2015. The argument, in short,
is that this decline in breadth — which is basically a way of
saying how many stocks are going up along with the broader
market — signaled
something going awry (or about to go awry) in the
stock market.

But in a note to clients on Tuesday, JP Morgan's Dubravko
Lakos-Bujas reminds readers that while it's true there are just a
handful of stocks doing most of the work to keep the S&P 500
afloat, nothing way outside historical norms has
been going on.

Stripping out the top 10 performers from the S&P 500 last
year and the index's total return (which includes the 2% divided)
would've been negative. As it stands, the S&P's total return
was 1.4% in 2015.

As Lakos-Bujas' chart shows, when the bottom 490
stocks in the S&P 500 fall the roughly 8% they have over the
last 12 months (remember: stocks have lost about 6% already this
year) and the top 10 stocks return about 4%, the market is
basically behaving as expected.

And so while it is true just a handful of stocks are doing
most of the work, when you think about moments of really outsized
market euphoria, things are looking pretty normal.